Irish theatre bites the Big Apple

ARTSCAPE:IT'S NOT SO much Sex and the City, as Beckett and the City. The Gate Theatre's Beckett Season is at New York's Lincoln Centre Festival, and true to his celebrity-bagging form, Michael Colgan has managed to snag Miranda for the Gate, writes Deirdre Falvey.

The American actress Cynthia Nixon, well known for her role as smart solicitor and single mother Miranda in Sex and the City, will recite excerpts from the novellas and some of Beckett's poetry at the Gate's Poetry and Prose Readings at Lincoln Center next weekend. Nixon is, apparently, an avid Beckett fan and wants to return to theatre, where she began her career. It'll be a star-studded evening, with performers including Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and Barry McGovern who are in Eh Joe, First Love and I'll Go On respectively at the Lincoln.

It's a big week for Irish theatre in NY, with the Abbey's Kicking a Dead Horse, by Sam Shepard and starring Stephen Rea, this week opening in a co-production with NY's Public Theater.

Charles Isherwood in the New York Times loved the opening, but wrote "Nothing in the play really improves upon that starkly eloquent initial image, which seems to announce with nary a word that Mr Shepard, who has drawn on visions of the West, mythic and real, for decades now, is about ready to give up the game, to intone the last rites over a galloping symbol of freedom, possibility, redemption. Although it provides a fine showcase for the craggily compelling Mr Rea, Kicking a Dead Horse is a disappointingly arid lament for America's lost ideals and despoiled frontiers."

Isherwood concludes "And yet Horse concludes with a grim but brilliant gag hinting that Mr Shepard may not have given up entirely on the theatrical lexicon that has proved so inspiring to him over the years . . . The horse is dead, true, but maybe, just maybe, there's some life left in him yet."

The Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, was guest of honour at a Culture Ireland do in New York, with Niall Burgess, Consul General of Ireland in New York, to celebrate the theatre double whammy.

Blackshaw donation

IMMA THIS WEEK formally unveiled a donation of four paintings from Basil Blackshaw's Window Series, donated in memory of one of Imma's main benefactors, the late Vincent Ferguson, by his wife Noeleen, his daughters Ciara, Judy and Emma and his sons John, Conor and Paul. The Fergusons, and Blackshaw's partner, Helen Falloon, were at the gallery this week for the presentation of the paintings (donated under section 1003 legislation), which were all made in 2001-2002.

The paintings mark the changing direction of Blackshaw's work over the past decade and were described by the artist as "my most perfect thought".

Businessman and art collector Vincent Ferguson, who died last year, previously donated, along with his wife Noeleen, 35 works to Imma, including works by Blackshaw, Brian Burke, Barrie Cooke, Patrick Hall and Anne Madden, which have featured regularly at Imma and throughout Ireland. Imma director Enrique Juncosa, who recalled this week a beach walk some years ago with Ferguson in Sligo, where he had retired, said the gift added substantially to the gallery's holdings of Blackshaw's works, "with a group of paintings which are generally considered among the most important of his later work. In them the depiction of objects has almost disappeared in favour of the presentation of light and space."

•ACTOR Brid Ni Neachtáin is delighted people will now be licking her head. She admitted this at the launch of four gorgeous new stamps from An Post, to celebrate some recent successes in Irish film-making. Filmed in Ireland is a series of four new stamps featuring Cillian Murphy in The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Pat Shortt in Garage on 82 cent stamps, and Brid Ni Neachtáin in Cré na Cille and Colm Meaney in Kings on 55 cent stamps. The stamps depict a rolling strip of film, and are a good deal longer than the usual stamp size.

•FISHAMBLE'S production of Sebastian Barry's The Pride of Parnell Street has been doing terrific business in the US, with a report of standing ovations every night at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven.

Variety described it as "perfectly pitched", and said it was "beautifully directed by Jim Culleton and performed by a pair of actors who feel for their characters down to their souls". The New Haven Independent wrote "Barry's greatest strength is his ability to capture the zeitgeist of an entire historical period in the stories of a few individuals." The production also went down well in Paris at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, and at the New Plays from Europe Festival in Wiesbaden. Not to forget Fishamble's Forgotten, with Pat Kinnevane, which has done well at the Prague Fringe Festival and International Theatre Festival of Sibiu; it's at the Edinburgh Fringe next month and the Liverpool Irish Festival in October.

Also at the Festival of New Plays from Europe in Wiesbaden, the German translation of Mark O'Rowe's Terminus was awarded special Certificate of Merit. The Irish Theatre Institute-funded translation had a rehearsed reading directed by Rachel West after the festival organisers saw the Abbey production in Dublin at the ITI international networking conference during last year's theatre festival, and the ITI took on the project. That Abbey production is currently preparing for the Edinburgh Fringe, where it plays in rep at the Traverse. Interestingly, in the light of recent, um, sensitivities, the Abbey and Druid will be co-cohabiting, so to speak, at the Traverse next month (Druid are presenting Enda Walsh's The New Electric Ballroom there, after its Galway Arts Festival premiere last week).

•LOTS OF the Irish art which is seen abroad couldn't get there without help from Culture Ireland - the agency's summer funding round awarded more than €400,000 to 80 arts projects in Europe, USA, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Australia.

There's a significant focus on visual arts, with help for 19 artists to exhibit abroad, including Nick Miller (€6,000 towards his solo exhibition at the New York Studio School Gallery), Clare Langan (€5,000 towards her participation in the Singapore Biennale), Cló Ceardlann na gCnoc in Donegal (€10,000 for participation in the Art Caucasus exhibition in Tbilisi), and ongoing support for galleries to promote Irish artists at international art fairs. Following its successful European, American and Asian tour of Oedipus Loves You, Pan Pan Theatre Company was been awarded €50,000 to present its next show, On a Scale of One to Ten (Crumb Trail) in Berlin and Dusseldorf. Other Irish work supported to travel to Asia included €35,000 to the Royal Irish Academy of Music Chamber Orchestra to tour China, Japan and Korea, and €5,000 to Sirius Art Centre to exhibit three Irish photographers at the Pingyao Photographic Festival in China. Filmmaker Tamara Anghie got €3,000 to show her award-winning short film New Boy at a film festival in Tokyo, while €6,000 went towards presenting young Irish film-makers at the Seoul International Youth Film Festival.

Young Irish traditional bands are supported to tour North America, including Téada at the Edmonton Folk Festival in Alberta and Slide, Líadan and the David Munnelly Band at US music festivals; CI chief executive Eugene Downes said a strong demand for emerging traditional groups was clear at its promotion at the APAP arts market in New York recently, which translated into festival and tour bookings. "We are also seeing a gradual move towards a collaborative and co-production model with international partners, which is a more sustainable long-term model for presenting work abroad," he said.

Culture Ireland's August 15th application deadline is for projects from November on. www.cultureireland.gov.ie